by Gordon Wheeler

A version of this article has appeared in The Bridge: Dialogues Across Culture, Edited by Talia Levine Bar-Yoseph, Gestalt Institute Press, 2005

“Goods are often incommensurable. People come at life from different places, they understand the world in different ways, they strive for different ends. This is a fact that has proved amazingly hard to live with…” — Louis Menand (2001)

Introduction—The Evolution of Culture

The Gestalt model is an approach to understanding the organization of experience — how it is that we get from the chaotic, overwhelming world of stimulus and event to the kind of organized, usable, and relatively stable sequences and pictures that serve us in our essential survival and growth task of predicting and dealing with contingency, both present and future. The ability to do this flexibly and creatively, across a variable range of conditions, is our fundamental species survival characteristic, the capacity that first set our particular evolutionary line apart from the other great apes, and then led to our spreading over and dominating the globe (a domination which may yet come to an end, if we do not solve the kinds of social and intergroup problems that will be discussed in this essay).

But this in turn means that these patterns and sequences — basically what we call meaning — cannot be laid down for us genetically, in more than the most fundamental process-organizational ways. What we inherit are certain basic perceptual and organizational biases: among them, our tendencies to notice differences, particularly points of differential in the visual field; our fundamental bonding instinct (including a particular brain locus for facial memory); our synesthetic bias to organize perceptions around a “body-self/external-world” boundary; the pre-organization of memory in terms of narrative (i.e., meaningfully linked sequences) and context (the constant drive to layer short-term memory into long-term structure, for efficiency of storage and recall); and so forth. Beyond this kind of process bias, essentially everything — the content of our understandings of our world, and how to deal with its challenges — has to be learned.

To take an example, the integration of “body-self” in distinction to “outer world,” mentioned above, is largely innate (“largely,” because like every genetically-based potential, it has to be activated in development, and can of course be compromised or distorted by the wrong activating conditions). But the equation of that differential with the idea of “me/not-me” (to use Sullivan’s terms [1953] for the “inner/outer” world distinction), which may strike us as inborn and self-evident in the West, is learned in social/cultural development, and highly particular to our own individualistic culture. Certainly there are many other cultures in the world, subcultures within our own societies, and experiential moments in all of our lives, where what I experience as “part of me,” even under life-and-death emergency, is not at all equivalent or limited to my experience of “body-self;” nor is it necessarily distinct from my experience of “us” (see discussion in Wheeler, 2003b).

In the overdetermined, recursive way of evolution, everything in the shared biological/ developmental life of our species is then organized around and in support of this essential preparatory learning period, which readies each of us, more or less, to deal with our world as active participants in an interdependent social whole, by the time we are physically and reproductively mature. That is, our immature birth and long dependent childhood are themselves an integrated response/adaptation to both the requirements of our particular bipedal variant on the chimpanzee body type, and the species need, as animals with a high-learning/low-instinct survival strategy, for an immature, slow-growing infant with a highly plastic brain, one which can be extensively organized after birth by the basic meanings and shared expectations and behavior patterns of the group. Again, these basic understandings and patterns cannot be genetically laid down, because then the species would not be as flexible as it is to adapt creatively to different environments — each of which may require a different technology, different expectations, and the different social organization that will support those things. Thus culture is itself a survival characteristic of the species: the need and capacity to learn the outlook and ways of our particular social group, the fact that the infant cannot not learn these fundamental patterns of relationship to the physical and social environment, is itself inborn. In the words of biologist Paul Ehrlich (2000), for the human animal, nurture is nature.

Thus paradoxically, the fact of culture is not itself a cultural fact, but an evolutionary necessity: all humans are acculturated. There can be no such thing as a human animal abstracted from her/his cultural nature, because even the provision of the most minimal infant care for survival necessarily imparts some cultural patterning in the process of the interaction (for a very clear account of how culture is transmitted from birth thru caretake/infant interaction, see Fogel, 1994).

What is learned in this developmental period, beginning immediately after birth (and perhaps before, since maternal nutrition and other kinds support or unsupport for expectant mothers and families are also cultural variables) includes much that we customarily think of as “culture” — things like religious and political beliefs, social and gender roles and expectations, attitudes and expectations about achievement, money, violence, sexuality, and so forth, — as well as many other things we may take for granted, from within our own culture, as just part of the “human condition.” These include things like body sense and body shame, attitudes toward (and experience of) pleasure and pain, sense of mutuality or isolation, the boundaries and content of individual self-definition, relations of the individual to the community, comfortable physical distance and privacy issues, some tendency toward optimism/pessimism, fearfulness/confidence, readiness to “stand out” or to merge with the group, and the like.

All these basic attitudes and meanings are also part of what we mean by culture. Culture is all those relatively stable features of a social group which are learned, are variable from group to group, and are in some way passed on from one generation to the next over time. Like anything in development, what is learned earliest then tends to be the most organizing for subsequent learning — and thus the most embedded, the most resistant to change later on. But what is earliest, and most ground- and brain-structuring for subsequent learning may also be what is most out of awareness, most experienced not as something learned but as just “the way the world is.” In other words, all those patterns in our experience that are the most deeply acculturated, are also likely to be the ones we are most unaware of, lenses that do not see themselves. This means that in the encounter between any two or more members of different cultures, the greatest source of difficulty and challenge may come not from the overt clash of beliefs and “isms” (which is challenging enough!), but from a much deeper, more paradigmatic level of assumptions: things like basic attitudes of trust or mistrust, emotional response to change, attitude toward outsiders, sense of autonomy and self-determination, attitudes toward future and past, gender and other expectations, and the like — none of which may be very clearly in the participants’ own self-awareness, or their awareness of the “inner world” of the other person. The deepest level of culture, then, is “reality” itself: all those things that I take to be not cultural, but just “the way the world is.” This then leaves us with a very tricky kind of problem indeed: for not only is culture itself built in to the nature of our species, but intercultural difficulty and even conflict are in a certain sense built in as well.

In the two-part discussion to follow, we will make use of this kind of Gestalt understanding of experience and development to inform our approach and analysis of the phenomenon of culture itself — culture as a necessary template for the organization of self-experience, and of interpersonal and intergroup encounter. The application of Gestalt insights and a Gestalt lens, we will find, will help clarify a number of longstanding issues in cultural and cross-cultural studies, shedding new light on a range of interventions, possibilities, and problems in the broad field multi-cultural work. To begin, in Part I we will consider our own cultural legacy in the West of cross-cultural studies and multi-cultural methodology, with an eye to surfacing some of our own inherited attitudes and basic assumptions. As we do this, we will also pay attention to what parts of this legacy may be useful to a more integrated, Gestalt perspective on cultural complexity in the “postmodern” world, in a sense collecting the insights from the past that will serve us here. Then in Part II we will move to consideration of what the use of a Gestalt perspective and methodology brings to these questions, and to strategies and practical understandings in this urgently challenging field in our multi-cultural world today.

Part I: Context and Ground: A Brief History of “Culture”

“Culture,” as a term referring not to arts and education but to some defined social entity with particular shared practices and meanings, is a relatively young usage, deriving out of the emergence of anthropology as a discipline and practice in late 19th Century Europe. These “Victorians” (especially the British, but including their Continental and transatlantic contemporaries as well) were great travelers, collectors, and cataloguers of “the exotic” (also known as “the primitive”) — much like the Greeks before them, only on a world scale now, and embued like the Greeks with a vigorous sense of their own cultural identity, self-consciousness, and “natural” superiority. Thus the noun “culture,” in the sense of “a culture,” itself arose “at the boundary,” out of multi-cultural contact and conquest, and in a context in which “contact” and “conquest” were overlapping, indeed nearly synonymous terms. In other words, from the beginning any discussion of “culture” has inherently implied a context of multi-culturalism — whether as a conflict between or among more than one identified group, or as an analytic activity involving a student or savant who is by definition looking on or in from outside the group studied. (Even the more post-modern activity of anthropological self-study entails a decentering of the observer/subject, and a kind of disidentification from his/her membership in the target group). This inseparability of “cultural” from “multi-cultural” is a point which will become important for us below, as we try to articulate a distinctively Gestalt contribution to discourse and practice in this lively and important field.

It is important to note that in this 19th and early 20th Century context, this new usage of “culture” was also quite close, often identical, to then-contemporary usages of the word “race,” a broad term generally understood in those days to include not just shared practices and beliefs but more importantly, the presumed basic characteristics and capacities of members of that group. Calling a culture or ethnicity a “race” had the effect of lending an air of scientific, biological legitimacy to the discourse of “cultures,” in a time where science was rapidly replacing religion as the wellspring of authority and values. This was the age of Darwin — and even more, of Social Darwinism (a reductionist popularization that went sharply against some of Darwin’s own ideas), — a time when biology burst free of the subservient role it had played since Aristotle’s day (and even more, since Newton’s), as mere taxonomer of God’s creation, to become preeminent in the sciences, the arbiter of all the others, and of religion, philosophy, and social policy as well. Social Darwinism, the original ground of what we now would call “multi-cultural discourse,” claimed scientific status for the ideological notion that whatever the current distribution of privilege and power between or among cultures, or among members of the same culture (Victorian men, say, and Victorian women), that plainly must reflect the distribution of innate intelligence, capacity, and worthiness, by virtue of the simple principle of “survival of the fittest.” And not only worthiness: in the metaphysics of Social Darwinism, to tamper with the the privileges of the powerful was so contrary to the supposed demands of nature that it threatened the very survival of the species. Humanity itself hung in the balance, with the scientific principle of Natural Selection replacing the Divine Right of Kings, as the metaphysical cement of the existing social order.

It was in this context and spirit that the statistician Sir Francis Galton (1869), for example, Darwin’s cousin and a prominent Social Darwinist, made part of his reputation by the “scientific” demonstration that the social (i.e., financial) achievement level of sons in a cross section of Scottish families correlated closely with the innate intelligence of their fathers. Now financial standing of sons is at least a clearly measurable variable, but how exactly did Galton undertake to measure “intelligence” in the fathers (this was long before the advent “IQ” tests, remember — themselves of course deeply flawed by cultural/psychological biases, and the wide misunderstanding of the difference between measurement of performance [on a test, e.g.] and inference of potential on the basis of that measurement; see Wheeler, 2000)? The answer, it turns out, is that he simply assumed the fathers’ innate intelligence levels — from their level of social class! (Moore, 2001; Robinson, 1986). The self-serving circularity of this kind of “science” didn’t seem to disturb very many people at the time: Galton was knighted for his contributions to biology and what we now would call evolutionary psychology — a school of inquiry which is still struggling to recover from its misuse in the hands of the early multiculturalist/imperialists.

All this was culture as what psychologists call “trait theory” with a vengeance, on a group level. Like all group trait theory models, this conception of culture tended strongly toward that much debated current bugaboo (and hot potato) “essentialism,” the doctrine that some essence of the group — “Englishness,” “Latin temperament,” “the Oriental mind,” etc. (including of course “masculinity” and “femininity”) — is a real “thing” and somehow inheres within each individual member (and possibly their descendants). Thus the world is safely pigeonholed into a manageable structure of groups — all from the point of view of a right-thinking, presumably male subculture self-consciously identified as “Anglo-Saxon,” whatever that is taken to mean.
But essentialism, even when it starts out “separate but equal,” always seems to collapse rapidly into hierarchical rank — generally, though of course not always, with the perceiver at the apex. The farther out one radiates from a self-perceived center of identification, the more “inferior” the labels then tend to become: “women are pure, if capricious;” “the Irish are born poets (and drunks);” “Russians are soulful, but prone to violence;” “Jews are avaricious,” “’Orientals’ are inscrutable, and unreliable;” “the Colored are like children;”and on and on. Thus even “separate but equal” tends to collapse rapidly into “unequal but divinely (or scientifically) ordained.” As Galton’s knighthood suggests, plainly the effect of the application of Social Darwinism to public policy could only be to justify European imperialism, and validate the existing social/political arrangements within the nations of Europe and the Americas as well, from the politics of “race” and class to the politics of gender and the family.

Critics of “Racialist” Essentialism

Among the first to critique the “essential traits” model of cultural and multi-cultural studies was the American anthropologist Frank Boas (1912). Using psychometrics and the measurement of body types to hoist the “racialists” on their own petard, he was able to show considerable plasticity of traits, even including physical traits, in the descendants of immigrants as compared to the original parent groups. In this stunning refutation of the extreme nature-over-nurture terms of the Social Darwinists, Boas argued persuasively that there was nothing inborn or “biological” about culture. Rather, a “culture” was fundamentally nothing more than a set of functional practices and beliefs, adapted to a particular time, place, and political/economic context. Change that context, and the culture changes — and its individual members with it. Moreover, there were no “essential” limits on the plasticity of the change: humanity was fundamentally unitary; all else was environ-ment. Desert nomads don’t build cities and write plays, in this view, not because they are “primitive” by nature (a circular term, Boas would argue, that confuses effects with causes, and then reifies those effects as “nature”), or incapable of understanding literature or government, but simply because deserts don’t lend themselves to large aggregations of people. But there is no “Arab mind,” say, that is somehow inherently inhospitable to crowds, or theater, or democracy. Likewise the (presumed) greater sexual conservatism of women is not due to anything essential to women’s nature or biology, but is largely a consideration of economics, especially the economics of childraising: give women jobs and birth control, and their sexual culture will change accordingly (as it clearly has, at least to a degree, though current DNA research on both humans and other primates seems to suggest that female “conservatism” was largely a wishful male myth to start with; de Waal, 1996).

Clearly this kind of Functionalist approach to understanding culture is at least a strong partial truth, if not the whole picture of what human culture is about, and it continues to play an important role in almost all cultural models and discourse today (with perhaps the exception only of the most extreme and Manichaean religious models). Equally clearly, Functionalism is largely compatible, at least, with a Marxist analysis and definition: culture as that set of practices and ideology which both flows from and reinforces or justifies a particular “means of production”– i.e., a particular technology (the plow, the gun, the rice paddy, the factory system — and the social structure that those means give rise to. When technology changes, a Marxist interpretation of culture would insist, culture changes — and “human nature” with it. To argue otherwise is to subscribe to a “bourgeois” belief system — i.e., the particular ideology that is generated by and supports modern capitalist arrangements of production.

But whether directly Marxist or not, the Functionalist position offered considerable support at the time for socialist and left-liberal programs of social meliorism and social engineering, and continues today, a century later, to serve as the dominant cultural theory for most progressive political movements (at times in combination with spiritual models, in the case of some faith-based progressivist movements). In all these cases, human plasticity is seen as essentially limitless, for both cultures and individuals; in the Functionalist view, that’s all there is to it.

Responses to Functionalism

Such materialist or pragmatist critiques of traditional “racialist” or essentialist models of culture and multicultural studies were themselves countered on a number of fronts, generally with emphasis on some deeper underlying causal system or dynamic principle in the construction of the coherent rough wholes of practice, belief, value, affect, perception, social/economic system and meaning that cultures represent, with various schools of thought emphasizing various ones of these terms. Among the first of these, not directly challenging Functionalism so much as putting it in contemporary political perspective, is the idea of cultures as interest groups, self-identified collections of people engaged in advancing their shared interests, goals, and concerns, and shared mores and meanings growing out of that common worldview — a point of view associated with the work of Bentley (1908), but plainly with roots going back to Madison (Hamilton et al, 2003), as well as earlier political writers like Machiavelli (1988) and even earlier classical sources.

This perspective, which refines rather than contradicts Functionalist approaches, is particularly interesting for the way it relates multi-cultural relations on an international stage to “sub-cultural” dynamics and tensions within national groups. Thus the idea of monolithic national culture is broken down: there is no one “French culture,” say, really, because the French polity itself will contain competing (or cooperating) parties, factions, and identified sub-groups, each with a slightly different set of cultural practices organized around their perceived interests, just as the world contains states, who represent theirs — as well as trans-national cultural groupings, such as the Church, Judaism, international trade unionism, the Communist party, people of Irish extraction, etc. etc.) This important point — the sheer multiplictiy of the potential cultural identifications which may be salient at different times for one person in today’s world — will be important for us below as we outline elements of a Gestalt approach to the meaning of culture in the “Age of Complexity” (Wheeler, 2000).

It is no accident that this view would be put forth in the United States, where “interest-group democracy” was being recognized as the order of the day (much decried by some more “idealistic” voices, perhaps most of all those, as both Marx and Nietzsche would predict, whose own interests are masked by their “idealistic” positions). Interest-group models of culture and multi-cultural contact continue to animate the political world, of course, for the undeniable reason that people have interests, and they tend to express them in groups (see for example Rorty, 1999, building on the earlier work of Dewey, 1967). Interest-group models also harmonize well with Nietzsche’s perspectivalist view (e.g., 1884), much exploited in current “postmodernist” discourse, that culture is simply a particular arrangement of dominance of some specific interest group over others, together with the ideology and “discourse” requisite to both expressing and masking that arrangement. Nor is it hard to see how the Nazis, with their own amalgam of deep Essentialism (our group is inherently superior) combined with competitive interest-group Functionalism (dominance by our group over theirs), would find much resonance in Nietzsche’s cultural perspectives, which seem to justify power for its own sake (again, always, in the much-abused name of Darwin). At the same time, it is easy to feel that this analysis, while pragmatic and valid as far as it goes, does seem to miss something of the “essence” of culture itself, its resistance at times to pragmatic considerations, the way people will often seem to act in ways counter to their own self-interest, for the sake of group membership and group meanings. Clearly this is a point which may be much clarified now by the Gestalt model’s emphasis on the formation and cohesion of integrated, whole pictures understanding. In the meantime, for then-contemporary consideration of cultural patterns that seem to transcend immediate self-interest, we have to turn below to other, more syntactic/symbolic approaches.

Meanwhile, another dynamic view of culture, closer in many ways to some religious perspectives, is represented by the evolutionary/historicist tradition, particularly teleological models such as Hegel’s (civilization as the gradual unfolding of an Idea, with different cultures at different stages along the way, and our own of course at the apogee [1828]), or cyclical cultural models such as that offered by Oswald Spengler (1926), who pictured civilizations as undergoing a life cycle of birth, infancy, growth, maturity, and decline. Both these historicist models (and Freud’s as well) make heavy use of the popular 19th Century notion, “ontogeny recapitulates philogeny” — the rather fanciful idea that the development of an individual, from embryo to adult, recapitulates the stages of development of the “race,” and vice versa. Of course the political use of this kind of model, not surprisingly, was once again to justify the existing order of things, in an ever more trans-national, multi-cultural, and EuroAmerican/imperialistic world. Our culture was vigorously “adult” (and appropriately masculine); other cultures were either immature, like children, or downright embryonic, or else possibly senescent (like China and the “feminine Orient,” in Spengler’s view). Indeed, you knew a culture was “primitive” (or senile) by the “childlike” tribalism of its personal identity structure (insufficiently individualistic) and its infantile gullibility (meaning belief in systems of superstition and magic other than our own) — or possibly by its adolescent/”Oedipal” rebelliousness and refusal to conform to adult European norms (also a common European view, of course, of United States culture). Either way, such groups were in our charge and care, and of course were to be disciplined firmly when they stepped outside the necessary order of things. Thus in cultural studies it seems that many models and theories, many different roads, can be taken to arrive at the same political/ideological destination.

The “ontogeny as philogeny” argument draws even more authority from the writings of Freud, who overlays on the “primitives as children” model, his own views of stages of psychosexual development (children as “primitives”). Various “primitive” cultures, in this view, are “fixated” at the various stages of libidinal cathexis and organization — oral, anal, phallic, genital, and so on. Once again, it is our role, as the “adult” culture, either to guide them along their proper developmental path toward our level (non-Essentialist or non-racialist Freudianism, viewing the “primitives” as capable of evolution), or else police them as best we can (Essentialist Freudianism: they’re stuck where they are for good. This was the dominant White view of my own childhood in post-war Southern U.S. apartheid, by which African-Americans were seen as fixated at a sort of combined oral/phallic stage by their essential nature, pleasure-oriented yet dangerously sexual, with strong Oedipal overtones, inherently beyond the reach of the beneficial anal/Calvinism of the dominant White Protestant group).

This tradition reaches its most complex elaboration in Erik Erikson’s celebrated 1951 model of cultural analysis, Childhood and Society, in which various tribal and national groups are analyzed according to their dominant developmental thematics along a classically Freudian grid. Certainly Erikson’s work, deriving as it does from the influence of Boas’s followers Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, as well as from his mentor Anna Freud, has little Essentialist flavor and doubtless no conscious intentions of social invidiousness or political dominance. But cultural studies and models of culture, like all theorizing about human nature, tend inevitably to partake of their own cultural context and ideology. And it is difficult to see how typing cultures as located along a linear progressive grid of psychosexual “crises” can have other than a delegitimizing effect, for those cultures nearer to the beginning of the line (America he saw as an “identity culture,” with a prolonged adolescent stage of self-definition — a typical European view, plainly allowing of more maturity than the other cultures depicted in his analysis).

Common Features of the “Dynamic” Models

What all these differing schools and approaches tend to have in common is their general stance of judging a culture from the outside — rather than attempting trying to understand it from the inside, as a primary goal. As always when analytic/objectivist models are applied to human affairs, the assumption is that a learned expert, sitting in his (sic) lab or armchair in some center of “Western” learning, just naturally is in a better position to understand what the relevant dynamics of a society, a relationship, or an individual psyche really are, than are any of the actual subjects being analyzed. Indeed, the very fact of being involved participants in one’s own culture, psyche, or relational life, with real stakes and values, and real consequences that matter, automatically disqualifies a person, in an “expert” model, from having a valid point of view on anything to do with her/his own process. He/she simply lacks the necessary detachment and distance, for an “objective,” scientific perspective. (This caveat is of course not applied to the expert him/herself).
The point of view is thus analytic/judgmental, not hermeneutic in the current sense of referring to the understanding of meanings in communication (though the term itself, much favored now in post-modernist discourse, had its own positivist roots in biblical textual studies back at a time when interpretation of texts was still understood as a process of revealing their objective, univocal meaning — from Hermes, the god of secrets).

Not that all such judgments were negative, by any means. On the contrary, idealized and often sentimental depictions of the supposed purity of heart and mind of “primitive” tribes and “noble savages” flourished as a sort of romantic counterpole to the rise of science and modernity, generally lamenting the losses of our rationalist, realist age, which has come at the price, in this view, of an earlier, happier fusion with nature. As Wordsworth puts it, in “Lines Written on Westminster Bridge,”

…great God — I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on some pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn:
Catch sight of Proteus, rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton, blow his wreathed horn.

“Pagans,” in other words, are much to be envied, from the point of view of our more advanced yet alienated modern condition. Still, the costs are plainly understood as necessary losses, like the child’s belief in fairies or Santa Claus, or the way adults are presumed, in these traditions, to lose access to wonder and playfulness, which after all have no place in the serious, grownup (and again, emphatically male) business of running the world. A more insidious variant of this romantic view is then found in the various fascist/folkloric cultural ideologies of the 19th and 20th Centuries, which generally aim at somehow combining modern production and technology with the presumed innocence and deeper sense of belonging of some earlier age. (Much debate has been devoted to the question of whether the quite disparate movements generally collected under the label “fascism” actually have enough coherence to be called an “ideology” at all; in our perspective here they are all thematically related, and are best understood as an overlapping cluster of reactions to the extreme individualism associated with Western modernism).

Still, for the most part all these dynamic, “organic,” or growth-stage models of culture, from the Marxist/materialist to the psychodynamic to the mystico-romantic, tend to converge in agreeing that modern, Western society is either at or close to some developmental pinnacle — albeit at the cost of a certain loss of innocence or charm (even Marx could grow nostalgic at times for feudalism, which at least didn’t reduce persons, as he saw it, to mere commodities). For that matter, even the Functionalist approaches themselves still generally assumed that the current Western functional arrangements of society were superior to other cultures studied. The fact that individuals were innately or potentially “equal,” and could move and adapt to different cultures, different functional arrangements of things without too much difficulty, did not mean that the societies themselves were to be regarded as equal. On the contrary, the fact that we could take this analytic or relativistic point of view on them, while they could not on themselves or us, was the proof that our culture was more advanced.

The Linguistic Schools—from Structure to Process

Thus the prevailing perspectives on “culture” by the early 20th Century were materialist/biological, Eurocentric, and generally dynamic/organic, in the sense of being powered through some sort of “lifecycle” by underlying forces that were generally invisible, and largely denied. Two of these dynamic stage models in particular, the Marxist/materialist (with its liberal/progressivist cognates) and the Freudian/psychosexual (together with its derivatives such as Erikson’s system, discussed above) then tended to dominate the field of cultural and multi-cultural studies at least through the first half of the century in Europe and North America. Both these traditions appealed to materialist science as their authority source — both with perhaps equal dubiousness, since two currents of thought more squarely based on untestable metaphysical assertions about reality, history, human motivations, and the like could hardly be imagined. Still, by mid-century, under the banner of “scientific materialism” and/or “depth psychology” (itself presumably based in biology), these two currents had effectively vanquished their more “metaphysical” rivals from the culture field (the folkloric, the fascistic, and the historicist or “spirit”-based alike) — using the now-familiar Nietzschean argument that if you disagreed with their propositions, that only meant that you were either too squeamish (the Freudian variation) or too self-interested (the Marxist) to face up to the plain truth.

At the same time, challenges were being mounted to both these families of models, again on a speculative/analytic basis, from quite a different quarter. This was the new cluster of interpretive disciplines and methods generally grouped under the movement known as “Structuralism,” which had long roots in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, the study of how we know things, and particularly the study of language and the emerging discipline of linguistics. Since linguistics was based in the history of languages, it naturally seemed to be largely co-extensive with the history of cultures; and since it was also concerned with communication, how languages convey meaning, it seemed to lead cultural studies back to the study of mind itself, those structures and categories of thought itself that must surely have something to do with the structures and categories of social interaction and cultural patterns — since it is the mind, after all, through which we know and engage in social/cultural inter-actions in the first place.

Structuralism, through the first half of the 20th Century, was then loosely associated with a number of quite diverse movements in art, psychology, and cultural studies, including Structural Linguistics, Symbolism, Semiotics, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism, and Gestalt psychology itself, among others. What united these various currents was their common reaction against the limits of reductionistic, positivist materialism (whether of the Marxist, the Freudian, or the “lab science” variety)– basically classical mechanics and Newtonian particle physics — to human thought and human affairs. In psychology this positivist line of thought was known as Associationism, the doctrine that perceptions correspond exactly to discrete physical stimuli in the environment, somehow strung together by the contiguity of the external stimuli (or perhaps just of “like” stimuli — a common formulation which seemed to beg the questions it was trying to answer, since how does a person recognize “likeness” of stimuli in the first place, so as to sort out the like from the unlike in building up some coherent picture of things?)

Having once questioned the pure objectivist model (the “likeness” is somehow just “in” the stimuli, a kind of circular argument-by-assertion), most of these movements then saw themselves steadily forced into more and more constructivist answers, in the way of the movement of Hermeneutics mentioned above, which evolved from revelation of the hidden meaning of a text, toward the study of how communication of meaning takes place at all, how meaning is “encoded” into a verbal or other “text,” and then “decoded” by a listener or other audience (to use more contemporary post-modernist terms). Likewise for linguistics, which moved during the century from the study of how “the” meaning is packed into a sentence, say, to a more relational, structural, and contextual approach to the dynamics of communication processes (see for example metacommunications theory, or Chomskyan linguistics [1972], itself a sort of positivist midpoint of this swing, still searching for the brain structure that would underlie or transcend these contextual, interpretive dynamics; see discussion in Deacon, 1999). And certainly nowhere was this movement more pronounced, away from the search for the structure of reality, toward a more distributive, relational approach to understanding human process, than in Gestalt psychology and its later offspring, Gestalt therapy. Since the brief tour here of cultural models and multi-cultural studies is being undertaken as background for the development of a distinctively Gestalt approach to multi-cultural and cross-cultural dynamics, we will be giving a great deal of attention to the implications of this model, and its evolution over the past century, in later sections of this essay.

Meanwhile, Structuralism had given rise to a seemingly new approach to cultural studies, with the work of Claude Levi-Strauss (1963), work which continues to have considerable influence on cultural anthropology and popular models of cultural studies and cross-cultural work. “Seemingly” new, because in Levi-Strauss’s hands, the approach is as firmly objectivist and expert-based as the Freudian and Marxist models it challenged, and as certain as any 19th-Century model of the clear dichotomy between modernism and “the primitive,” all as seen from the confident point of view of a professorial study in Paris. Cultures, according to this model (meaning “primitive” cultures), are best understood “structurally” — that is, as thematic clusters of certain repeating patterns which permeate all aspects of that culture’s life. These themes — broad categories like centripetal/dispersive, found/made, open/closed, horizontal/vertical, etc. — are of course largely invisible (again) to the participants in the culture, who in any case are not likely to be individuated enough to take a decentered perpspective on matters and processes they are living holistically and unreflectively. Since both economic and psychosexual factors are rejected as causing these dominant thematic patterns, it is largely left unclear what exactly does cause them, or how they arise developmentally, so that the various “primitive” cultures come to differ so much from each other, or for that matter from us.

At the same time, this perspective is firmly positivist/realist: the structures as perceived by the anthropologist “really exist,” just as Freud felt the “Oedipus complex” really existed, concretely, and not just as an organizing or interpretive construct. This is true either despite or actually because of the preservation of a safe and hygienic distance from any actual contact with the “primitives” imagined and invoked — which turns out in any case to be impossible. This conclusion is laid out in Levi-Strauss’s first book, Tristes Tropiques (1961), in which he reports on his extended early visit to Brazil, where he chiefly spent time with two different “primitive” tribes. With the first, since they had already had extensive contact with Europeans, some ideal essence of “the primitive” he was looking for was already corrupted and lost; therefore it was as if he was contacting only a dim and distorted reflection of his own culture. And with the second, since they had not had previous contact, he concluded that no contact or communication across such a cultural chasm was possible, by definition, since the two “mentalities,” his and theirs, had no common ground! Either way, real contact seemed to be impossible, in the presence of any real difference. Thus he retired to his study in France, to ponder the common symbolic elements of “culture” in the abstract and the real meaning of “the primitive,” without the corruptive and confusing effects of any actual cross-cultural contact, which in any case he seemed to have proved was logically unattainable.
The connection is strong here with familiar mid-century Existentialist/individualist themes about the fundamental solitude of each person, isolated in his/her own subjective universe, never able to “really know” or be known by another person. By the same token, the attitude is resonant with Freud’s earlier lament about another exotic “Other:” women. “What do women want?” he famously asked — but only rhetorically, not of any actual women. In both cases, the detached expert observer ponders and plumbs the depths of his own subject of study — while carefully avoiding the contact he assumes to be out of reach, because the “Other” presumably doesn’t know her/itself reflectively, by definition (or else they wouldn’t be “Other,” but would graduate to “our” level — that of a privileged, European, and in this case male elite, which it is impossible for them to do). Thus only the detached expert can answer the question for them.

Today, with the multiplicity of viewpoints of a global culture in a post-modern world, and the saving distance of half a century and more, it is easy to see both the arrogance and intellectual limitations of these more extreme “Eurocentric” approaches to understanding culture and cultures, including Levi-Strauss’s. At the same time, for all its limitations and distortions, and along with the deeply embedded, implicit imperialism of the viewpoint, there are real contributions here that will serve us as we try to develop a model that is more more dialogic and mutual, in Part II of this essay. Fundamental to these contributions is Levi-Strauss’s firm sense of cultural holism, the way the various dynamics and thematic elements of a given culture tend to work together as a whole. This is in contrast to the more atomized tone of some interpretations of Functionalism, where each separate element or practice of a culture may be discussed for its immediate pragmatic value, without reference to how it fits into a whole picture (see for example Malinowski, 1944).

With Structuralism, growing as it does out of linguistic studies, the perspective moves in the direction of being more deeply syntactic: that is, the meaning of a given element is always contextual, in relation to its interaction with all the other elements — just as the meaning of a particular symbol or sentence is understood, ultimately, not just directly in reference to the action or thing it points to, but in relation to the language system as a whole. Cultural “elements,” that is — practices, rituals, transactions — are to be understood symbolically, which means in relation to all the other symbols and signs of the culture. (And again, for an impressive and highly influential mid-century attempt to combine the holism of the Structuralist approach with Freudian and Marxist perspectives, see Erikson’s ambitious 1951 synthesis based on child-rearing as the pivotal dynamic of cultural transmission, from one generation to the next).

Beyond Structuralism

If Structuralism dominated the field of cultural and multi-cultural studies for a time at mid-century (in European thought at any rate, often blended with psychoanalytic views and always in stiff competition with Marxist models), it has since given way to approaches known, for want of a better collective label, as “post-structuralist.” The shift here is generally some attempt to get beyond the assumption and imposition of “the structure” of a culture by an outside observer, to the more interactive perspectives of participant-observers, struggling with the more complex and rewarding problems of that more engaged position. Of particular interest to us here is the work of Clifford Geertz (1973, 1988), as the line of thinking perhaps closest in many of its assumptions and approach to those of a Gestalt perspective on culture. For Geertz, culture is to be understood first of all as a shared system of communicated meanings. This means that a culture is best approached as a particular, relatively coherent set of signs and symbols, which a certain group of people are able to communicate and transact together successfully. The way a group is able to do this — to “decode” communications and signs successfully, in post-modern terminology — is through an appeal to a common fund of shared underlying attitudes and assumptions (an idea deriving from metacommunications theory; see e.g., Vigotsky, 1978). The definition of a given culture then becomes that group which shares a given or overlapping set of such underlying assumptions. Since many or most such assumptions will be out of awareness most or all the time, it becomes clear how and why it is that the possibilities for intercultural misunderstanding and conflict are almost limitless.

The peripheral boundaries of such a group then always have to be seen as somewhat fluid, geographically or socially, with varying degrees of centrality or marginality — and thus varying degrees of capacity to communicate successfully in the culture. Does a border tribe or border province group, such as for instance the “Tex-Mex” region of the Rio Grande valley in the southwestern United States, belong to US culture, to Mexican culture, or to its “own” culture? The answer would have to be all three of these, in varying ways, depending on the particular issue invoked and the communication being transacted. The resonance here with a Gestalt model of field organization in terms of shifting experiential boundaries is immediately clear, and will be discussed further below.

Conflict, both within and across various cultural boundaries, then is understood not just as a clash of interests (though it may or may not be that, of course), but as a clash of meanings. Meanings in this sense are close to values — the valences we attach to particular actions or principles, which are always in relation to other values. To try to “solve” a conflict across a cultural boundary then becomes misguided or counterproductive, unless and until one has engaged in some understanding of the dynamic, interactive place of that issue and its meaning, in the shared subjective context of the culture of each party. Such engagement is necessarily dialogic in the sense of the Gestalt model’s use of the term (meaning the attempt to enter into the other person’s or group’s experience and worldview, “from the inside”), and clearly dependent on the establishment of safe and supportive conditions for such an engagement. Again, since many of those meanings are held out of awareness at a deep level, the wonder is not that cross-cultural contact and communication are so often problematic and conflictual, but that they are possible at all.

Plainly Geertz’s world, of the inherent challenge and difficulty of intercultural contact, is our world, the world we see everywhere around us today, in the workplace, on the multinational stage, between and among the generations or genders, and the religions of the world. Namely, a world rife with the possibility and propensity for intercultural misunderstanding and cross-cultural conflict, often tragic in nature. In this world, alas, “safe and supportive” conditions are most often exactly what are missing, in cases of multi-cultural contact, conflict, frustration, or breakdown. To deal with this challenge, what is needed is a new model of cultural and multicultural studies, one that can synthesize all that is usefully true out of these cacophonous and conflicting traditions, and provide the outlines and the foundations, at least, of a clearer methodology for approaching and transforming destructive multicultural contact and conflict. And to do all that, we need a new and clearer anthropology, in the sense of an understanding of human nature and its dynamics in relationship and culture. It is to this that we will turn in Part II of this essay, as we begin to articulate a specifically Gestalt approach to understanding and intervening in multi-cultural issues.

Part II: Toward a Gestalt Model of Culture, Cross-Cultural Contact, and Multi-Cultural Conflict

Reviewing Part I—the Evolutionary Basis of Culture

In Part I of this two-part essay we began the outline of a new approach to cultural studies and multi-cultural contact, based on and informed by a Gestalt, whole-field, evolutionary approach. As a point of departure, we considered our most basic, creative problem-solving/gestalt-forming nature, our hallmark adaptation for flexibility and problem-solving, as a species that is necessarily low-instinct, high-learning, and the most complexly, flexibly social of all the animals. This combination of conditions and evolutionary responses, taken together, led us to the observation that culture is our basic species adaptation. Culture, that is, is not an overlay on our biological nature, something “added on” to “who we really are” (or even counter to who we really are, as both the traditional Freudian and early Gestalt models sometimes tended to conceive it). Rather, culture is the completion of our biological development, which is left incomplete at birth to allow for that maximum adaptability to different environmental conditions which is the fundamental human survival strategy, human nature itself. Nature, in other words, is not separable from nurture, at least in the human case.

Our gestalt-formation process, the active rendering of the chaotic world of stimuli into useable, organized wholes or meaningful units, is likewise part of our evolutionary nature, our underlying process/structure which yields our flexible problem-solving strategy for dealing with a range of different physical and social environments. That is, we must scan/select and form whole pictures, compare them with our accumulated learning, run scenarios in imagination, estimate outcomes, and sort those predictions in emotional/valuative terms. This is what “flexible problem-solving” is, and how it works (see also Wheeler, 2000, 2003b). Relying and building on this basic prcess is how modern humans have become, in the winkingly brief span of around a hundred thousand years, the dominant (large) species on the globe.

Part of this process is what in the Gestalt model is called “figure formation,” the selection and organization of features of the environment into coherent wholes in relation to our felt needs and concerns. But figure formation by itself is meaningless, without “ground,” which is the Gestalt term for the organized structure and process for retaining and evaluating these “pictures,” or learning. Thus the distributive nature of the human brain, which we may conceive metaphorically as a set of concentric rings, where active attention and memory “in the center” are constantly being invested with our evaluative, emotional response — and then based on that energetic charge, either discarded (like a bit of neutral information we needed only for a moment), or else linked into a network of associated imagery in the surrounding “rings” of progressively more remote background circles or layers, which require progressively less attention and energy to “run.” Thus new learning is constantly being converted and relegated to automism, with new, short sequences of attention steadily integrated into longer, smoother sequences of more or less automatic behavior — giving us a steadily richer repertoire of learned capacity to draw on, and at the same time available attentional energy to devote to the new problem, the new “figure,” as we deal with ever-new situations and demands. This is what learning is: the conversion of “figure” to “ground.”

In problem-solving, this sequence is then reversed. The new problem is generally addressed (at least in imagery or mental rehearsal) with the automatic response which is “closest to the center,” and takes the least time and energy to summon up. Only when this leads to a bad outcome (again, in real action or in imagination) do we need to “reach further,” stopping and devoting the time and space and effort to sort through a range of possible scenarios and responses, activating more and different associations and response networks. In extreme cases we may even take apart or “deconstruct” tightly integrated response sequences, so as to “color” their parts with different emotional charge, enabling them to integrate anew, and differently. This is “deep relearning,” of the kind that goes on in therapy (physical or psychological), the deconstructive process of relocating and attending to the parts that went into these integrated wholes of learning, and experimenting with them to change their cognitive/emotional/physical sequence and meaning. Integration itself, the move from separate intentions to automated sequence, is a spontaneous process that we don’t have to will: it is the deconstruction of prior assumptions, previous patterns, that has to be willed, and takes extra support and energy.

All this is directly relevant to our consideration of culture and multi-cultural contact here because the earliest, deepest level of tightly integrated, automized, long-sequence learning — what in learning models is sometimes called “basic assumptive set,” is culture itself. We said in Part I of this essay that culture, at this deepest level, is everything we assume about “the way the world just is:” that is, paradoxically the most basic level of acculturation is that which does not strike us as cultural, but universal. This is why inter-cultural contact and experience can sometimes feel disorienting, giving us a sense of “losing our bearings:” such contact may threaten our “firm grip on reality” — since, to repeat, “reality” itself is our particular cultural ground. Thus a Gestalt perspective leads us straight to the dual propositions that not only culture itself, but the potential difficulty of inter-cultural contact as well, belongs inherently to our nature. Our natural first response to threat at this level will always tend to be to strengthen and rigidify the automated sequences and assumptions already in place. The more demanding and conflictual the conditions and the stakes of the encounter, the more rigid we are likely to become — because deconstruction requires time and energy, which means safety from the pressure of emergency.

In other words (and this is the first corollary of the dual proposition above), productive, creative intercultural contact requires particular conditions of safety and support — conditions and support which are most often lacking, in the real intercultural conflicts and emergencies of the real world. We can never be sure that we have come to the end of the questioning and deconstruction of our own culture, our own acculturated assumptions about the world and the people in it. Rather, what we can do, in the light of these Gestalt insights, is to adopt a metacultural perspective on our own assumptions and beliefs. This means that rather than “getting over” our cultural “limitations” (or claiming/imagining that we are ever able, finally to put them aside), we hold our own culture and assumptions differently, more lightly, using them as the basis of a dialogic inquiry about the other’s culture — and using that dialogue as the necessary means, for learning about our own.

With these Gestalt perspectives in mind, what are we then to make of the past century and a half or so of cultural studies in our own “Western” culture? What parts of that heritage are useful to us now, as we move to explore a specifically Gestalt approach to culture and multicultural studies — bearing in mind the tangled web of cultural blinders and self-justifying assumptions that permeated that legacy, parts of which must still be with us today? What specific insights and tools of the Gestalt model can serve us in our approach to this difficult field now, as we articulate our model?

What is needed now — since we can never finally free ourselves from our own acculturation — is a model that is not just deconstructive/dialogic, but includes as well the tools for its own deconstruction, for questioning itself and us, as we employ it. In what follows, we will present seven propositions from the Gestalt perspective we have been developing here, on human nature, the human learning process, and their implications for cultural studies and work. Each of them has direct applications to multi-cultural work, either changing the approach somewhat or clarifying some practical principle already known in the field. Fittingly for a holistic model like Gestalt, each of the propositions also tends to contain, imply, and/or follow from all the others. Taken together, they give us the beginnings at least of a coherent Gestalt stance toward this difficult, urgent work. Such a model then changes our understanding of culture and its dynamic role in our lives, and changes our approach and our interventions in this complex, challenging field.

1. All contact is cultural contact — This follows from our discussion above, about culture as human nature, and Gestalt process as the fundamental structure of human functioning. For any perception to be meaningful and usable to us, it must be related to a network of previous perceptions and learnings — what in Gestalt is called “ground.” At the deepest level, those “ground assumptions” — basic, long-ago learning about the world and our place in it — do not feel like learnings at all (because they are largely preverbal, relational, and embodied). Rather, they strike us, if we lift them up at all, as reality, “the way the world is.” And these deepest, out-of-awareness assumptions are not only culturally determined and culturally variable: they are culture itself.

   It is important to note that this idea goes sharply against the grain of liberal, Western, assimilationist assumptions and social norms. In our individualist society, it is common (and even considered progressive) to think of people as “individuals first,” and thus of culture as a sort of limiting bias, something that educated people “get over.” The implication is that once we attain some ideal developmental level of individuation, we are “beyond” cultural limitations, and ready to have “culture-free” (read “real”) transactions and communications. This idea is then both dangerous and counter-productive to successful multicultural work, in ways that we will be developing below.

   The complementary concern of the liberal attitude is the quite reasonable fear that relating to people in terms of their cultural background or memberships may seem to play into stereotypes and prejudices — as indeed it may, and inevitably will, as long as we assume we know the meaning and relevancy of some particular membership or heritage “from the outside,” without inquiry of the person or persons involved (this is the “expert perspective” we discussed in Part I, in connection with Levi-Straus and many other writers on culture). The answer to this dilemma involves a shift to a more complex way of thinking and holding awareness — also developed below.

   Meanwhile, doubtless no two people in the world can ever have exactly the same background assumptions in this sense; even within the “same culture,” differences of sub-culture, ethnic group or region, gender culture, religion, class and family culture, and so forth will mean that fundamental, integrated conclusions or schemas about the nature of the world and ourselves will differ from person to person and group to group. Still, as long as the cultural overlap is “similar enough,” then people may generally get away with ignoring or deferring the differences. However, even within what appears (for the moment at least) to be “the same” culture, the contact that occurs is still a cultural experience. It is still filtered through a particular cultural lens — even if that lens for the moment is (or seems) unproblematic — because there is no other kind of contact. Indeed, our greatest and most dangerous “blind spots” may often arise precisely when we are speaking with people from the “same” culture as ourselves — because those are the times we may feel least challenged to lift up our own unexamined assumptions for new awareness. And this may tend to happen precisely at moments of intercultural pressure or perceived threat — just the very times when we need a broader perspective most! Under a felt threat, Instinctively people will often “reach for” points of assumed cultural similarity with those around them, to strengthen relationships and solidarity, glossing over differences (sometimes with unexpected consequences, as when they wrongly assume that some shared membership will yield a shared prejudice or particular view of the world — or that the shared solidarity will outlive the emergency).

   As to how we do determine what “similar enough” is in the first place, so that identity may be presumed and relatively clear transactions may (sometimes) take place, that too will be developed below, in Proposition 3. But first, a more immediate corollary:

2. The encounter between consultant (counselor/therapist/coach) and client is itself an intercultural exchange — This follows of course from Proposition 1, but it is important to state it directly for emphasis. It is easy for us to see that the client or clients, or the various parties to some intercultural difficulty, have a “culturally biased” point of view: much harder, oftentimes, to remember that our own point of view, ultimately, is also “biased” — because there is no such thing as an “extra-cultural” point of view. Again in Gestalt terms, outlined above in developmental and evolutionary perspective, this would be a “figure without a ground” — by definition something completely meaningless.

   This in turn means that in any meaningful encounter, culture can never be “off the table.” That is, whenever a client (again, whether in consulting or therapy) is not supported to question the cultural perspective of any other party (including especially the consultant or therapist), then the effectiveness of any intervention will be diminished — because the client will necessarily “discount” the intervention for its unknown or potential cultural bias. The working rule of thumb is always: whatever is out of bounds (gender, perceived power, other positional/membership issues), is potentially controlling the conversation. If it’s not “on the table” (at least potentially), it’s “under the table.” If you can’t talk about it, then you have to “project:” that is, to imagine the meanings behind the behavior, so as to know how to interpret the person and deal with his/her behavior at all.

   There is no prior, categorical solution to this inherent, dynamic dilemma of all human contact — no way to solve this problem for once and for all, or even to hold it constant, while other things vary. Culture, and the necessity of each party to take relevant perceived/imagined membership into account, as she/he interprets and evaluates the other’s communications, are always dynamically present. The only remedy lies in a change in process. To prepare the ground for understanding the nature and importance of that change, we need to understand something about cultural membership itself, and how it is that we know what culture we belong to and identify with.

3. All culture is multi-culture — This proposition is true in two senses. First, as the pioneering African-American author W. E. B. DuBois (1986) insisted with regard to “race,” there is the fact that culture does not come up as an awareness or an issue, until we are in the presence of an activated cultural boundary. That is, culture is an idea that arises in the encounter with another culture. Until that time, we do not experience ourselves as living in “a culture,” or even “in culture;” we are “just living.” The profound implications of this point for Gestalt work with cultural issues will be taken up below, especially under Proposition 8.

   Second is the fact that every person belongs to multiple cultural groupings, each with its own boundaries, interests, criteria, and meanings. This notion builds first on the observations of Bentley (1908) and others of a century and more ago, discussed in Part I of this essay. It was Bentley’s insight that cultures, particularly large national cultures, are never by any means so monolithic as outsiders imagine them to be — and particularly as outsiders may perceive them during times of intercultural stress or conflict. Rather, a culture is made up of many distinct “interest groups,” such as class or religious/ethnic group, which may be at odds with each other in various ways. These groups may fulfill all the criteria of “cultures,” having identified membership and boundaries, traditions and rituals of their own, and particular meanings and relationships of terms and concepts that are different from those held by other groups in the “same” (national) culture. This is of course a central idea of the liberal/pluralist tradition — the unifying theme and insight, for example, of the great leftist film director Jean Renoir (generally accorded to be the most influential artist in the dominant Western medium of the 20th Century), whose work constitutes a sustained lament that the social units that have armies and weapons (i.e., nation states) are, tragically, not natural social groupings at all. To Renoir, the natural affinities between people and among peoples are along lines of class, not nation, with wars often serving the real purpose of reestablishing the hegemony of the privileged classes. In his films members of the working class of different nations — even nations at war — who do not even speak the same language, still recognize each other instinctively and communicate easily. Likewise the aristocrats and plutocrats of the nations of Europe have an instinctive affinity and “speak the same language” (literally, since the upper classes of all the Western nations of the day all learned French. In Tolstoy, to illustrate Bentley’s point, French is actually the first and sometimes the only language of Russian aristocrats).

   But Bentley tended to regard such identifications as fairly static, or at least arranged in some stable hierarchy (as in U.S. politics, where religiously affiliated politicians often take pains to assert that they are “Americans first,” and religious congregants second). In fact, each of us belongs, potentially and in various circumstances, not just to class and religious/ethnic identity groups, but to many other groupings as well, with varying levels of depth of influence on our perceptions of the world, both in and out of awareness. Some of these, like age group and (especially in “post-industrial” societies) profession, may change over time; others, such as ethnicity or gender, now seen as a powerful co-determinant of one’s perceptions and outlook, are (almost always) stable. Still others, such as primary sexual orientation/identity, are relatively stable and powerfully organizing, but may sometimes change in the course of a lifetime. Moreover, where earlier thinkers and artists often thought in Marxist-derived terms of conscious self-interest, a Gestalt perspective points us more broadly to issues of belonging and identification, of which immediate self-interest may be a part, as organizing dynamics of the experiential field.

   This multiplicity of group identification and membership may be most evident in modern pluralist societies, but it applies to “traditional” or “holistic” societies as well (those cultures which used to be known as “primitive,” as we discussed in Part I, largely for their presumed failure to emphasize individual over collective identity). Such cultures may look “consistent” or monolithic from the outside, but inside them people are quite expressive and aware about the importance of their multiple memberships in various clans, totem groups, families, regions, professional, and especially gender groupings, each of which may have its own calls for allegiance, interests, and ways of looking at the world and communicating with each other (and with “outsiders”).

   The Gestalt perspective tells us that we have to organize our perceptual world, to render it into a world of experience, dynamically structured perceptions which we can invest with intention and emotion, on the way to coping and experimenting and problem-solving in the real worlds of our lives. Culture theory points out that this dynamic organizing process is heavily prestructured and codetermined by our felt experience of belonging and identity, which enters into our interpretive process, bending and coloring it toward structures and concepts that are intelligible to our fellow group-members in a shared way. All that is part of our “natural equipment,” naturally developed through nurture (which is always acculturated). Our being, that is, is a “being-in-culture;” nature and nurture, as we insisted in Part I here, are one.

   To this picture we now add a sometimes-dizzying plethora of potential cultural memberships: it is in this sense that each of us is inherently multi-cultural — group identities which may of course conflict, between members of “the same” group, or even within one person. Moreover, plainly some or all of these significant memberships may be in play at the same time, or in rapid succession. And yet people have to act, to make choices and at times to take sides. How do we know which one of these potentially conflicting identifications counts, which one “trumps” the others, at a given moment? Here too the Gestalt perspective can shed some light, in a way that is both commonsensical and theoretical clarifying — as should always be true of a model that prides itself on being “experience-near.”

4. Boundary depends on context — The short answer to the question above is simply, it all depends. What it depends on is the shifting organization of the experiential field at the moment. That organization, our sense of felt reality, what the world “looks like” at the moment, depends on which membership or identification (which cultural ground) is salient to us at the moment: that is, which is most relevant as a dynamic context for our felt concerns, needs, and intentions at the time (including our need for belonging, which implies the welfare of our identified group or groups). These identifications need not be in conscious awareness to have organizing power — though they will tend to come into awareness at times of conflict, particularly internal conflict (as when I am torn between loyalties, or conflicted about my identity). These conflicts can be particularly anguishing, at a conscious level — and particularly disorienting, when they take place at a level out of awareness. An acute example of inner/outer struggle of this type would be the poignant case of patriotic Italian Jews, with the coming of Fascism in the 1920’s. Italian Fascism was officially (yet not for the most part violently) anti-Semitic, and at the founding of the Party Jews were not allowed to join. Some liberalization took place during the 20’s but after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, restrictions on the civil rights of Jews in Italy progressively increased (open violence and deportations became common only once the Gestapo moved in, after the fall of Mussolini in 1943). For almost the first time since the Middle Ages in Italy, deep cultural habits, assumptions, rituals, and relational gestures that a person might express as a Jew came into direct conflict with those that the same person might experience and exhibit as an Italian. This conflict was all the more excruciating in that “Italy” as a national identity was quite a recent cultural innovation: the creation of the unified Italian state was still within living memory at the time; and Jews had generally been among the strongest supporters of the union.

   Ethnic/political conflicts like this — and they are only all too common through history, and today — are often tragic; but parallel examples on a less dire level abound. I have written elsewhere (Wheeler, 1997) about the experience of arriving in Africa for the first time, and inquiring of an African psychiatrist colleague how much he had “tipped” a young man in a restaurant, whom he had sent out on a small errand. His response was to correct me earnestly, saying that it was not at all a “tip,” that the young man owed us the service just by virtue of our being older, and that in the village he would know that, reciprocally, we would take care of him and his family in case of need. Since we were not in the village, he had given the young man money for food, to indicate the caretaking, and compensate for the fact that in a city of over a million people, he had no village elders of his own.

   On the one hand, this vignette illustrates Geertz’s (1973) point discussed in Part I, which also derives from the terms of the Gestalt model as we are outlining it here: namely that the “same” gesture (giving a small coin on the occasion of a personal service) is not really the “same” at all, in the context of a different cultural ground. In the “conscience” of my own American culture, an economic exchange of labor and money has integrity, and satisfies the demands of my own internalized cultural standards and belonging, when it is characterized by “fair pay for fair work.” In my host’s culture, the “same” gesture was in satisfaction of the membership values and meaningful criteria of a village culture of mutual caretaking. But at the same time, the example also serves to illustrate my colleague’s attempt to reconcile his own felt internal multi-cultural tension, as he enacted a small echo of the meaningful gestures of his culture of origin, in the quite different context of an urban, Westernized professional world, with a money economy and literally tens of thousands of young men in the city with no supportive social connections and no particular occupation, eager to perform odd jobs in the expectation of monetary reward. Thus my colleague, who told me he often felt quite overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of homeless and rootless youth, and who was already supporting perhaps twenty dependents on a small University medical salary, was attempting as best he could to enact both cultures at once in a single gesture, which had at least somewhat compatible meanings in two quite different cultural systems (in either understanding, the boy did at least get something to eat).

   In a greater or lesser degree, each of us experiences inner multicultural tensions of this sort, in which various loyalties and cultural “instincts” may be activated, some of which may conflict with others. As always in our cognitive/emotional life, our natural response is to try to achieve an integration that transcends the apparent conflict, a whole picture which is well-enough structured and articulated to serve as a reliable base for action; this process, which itself transcends culture (and indeed gives rise to our experience of it) is what the Gestalt model is all about. Where we cannot achieve this, and have to choose between different cultural imperatives and meanings which are both activiated and important, we feel significant tension, in proportion to the importance of those identifications, and the felt threat to our membership. In my own case, I am readily aware of the felt pressures and pulls of my memberships/identifications as a member of Western/rationalist culture (with its steady pressure for consistency of ideas), as an American and specifically a Southerner (and more particularly, as an American with progressive political identity, and a Southern liberal/dissident, both quite self-conscious sub-cultures with meanings, traditions, and demands of their own), as a man in the gendered sense (with a tendency to assume certain commonalities of meaning and experience with other males, certain shared pressures and responsibilities — again in the more specific context of an identified sub-group of “non-macho” or in a sense dissident-identified males), and also a member of a particular professional culture (one which is quite self-conscious about its own cultural demands). All of these are deeply organizing to various degrees, and exert powerful pulls in particular situations, sometimes in contradictory ways. In addition, a later identity (yet one that builds clearly on family/ sub-cultural traditions of political dissidence) is as a member of an emergent world culture, with accompanying feelings of responsibility (and often helplessness) with regard to global problems.

   Which of these cultural memberships (and others) is “up” at a given moment? This is an important thing to know, both to understand oneself and make decisions more successfully — and especially to know of other people. After all, if we do not understand the context and meaning of particular gestures to that given person in that given situation (in other words, the relevant cultural boundaries being evoked), then it quickly becomes impossible to predict, understand, or negotiate the person’s behavior. Communication, teamwork, management, and personal relationship alike then suffer, or even become impossible.

   Plainly knowing the relevant cultural “ground” at a given time is no easy matter — especially given, as we have already said, that this is something we are by no means always aware of ourselves. Simple asking may well not suffice, if the person does not have a clear cultural perspective on him/herself (as in the case of all those cultural beliefs and assumptions that just feel like “givens,” the “way the world is”).

   Our answer is dialogue, in a special sense which lies at the heart of all inter- and intrapersonal work that is informed by a Gestalt perspective. And this is a term which is important enough in our perspective here to stand as a proposition in its own right.

5. Dialogue as the fundamental intervention of a Gestalt approach to culture issues — We come here to a familiar term which has a particular use and meaning in Gestalt work, one which is directly relevant to our concerns here. Dialogue, as we use the term here, means a particular kind of conversation in which the goal is not limited to expressing your perception or position, but rather focuses on clarifying the sources and meanings of the various points being expressed: not just what you want or believe, but why that particular thing is important to you. That is, the intention that organizes the activity and experience is not prevailing, but deep understanding. In Gestalt terms, this means a shift in focus from “figure” to “ground.” Not your position itself, that is, but “where you are coming from,” what the meaning of the figure is to you, in relation to your own ground of beliefs, values, goals, expectations, and loyalties. These are things, as we keep saying, that we may not immediately know ourselves, or know fully; thus the conversation requires active listening, or listening coupled with a particular kind of open inquiry, aimed at making sure you are understanding and have been understood. Not agreed with: that would be in the nature of a conventional debate. Rather, the stance in dialogue is one of exploration and discovery, not right and wrong — understanding how the perspective of the other person coheres and relates to her/his actions (and making one’s own understood), as distinct from “winning” or “losing” a point.

   The applications to communication across a cultural boundary are immediate and evident. If culture is “in the ground” of the perception or position — and if that ground, again, is often unexamined or taken as obviously given, — then trying to come to some kind of understanding or agreement at the level of “figure” (behavior, perception, the position you take or the goal you seek) may often be hopelessly off the point. The terms of the discussions, and the values attached to them, may simply be different — even incommensurate — across a significant cultural boundary. If we cannot find a way to stop and shift the discussion to those meanings and values, and how they connect with other meanings and values in that subjective, felt world, then oftentimes the parties will just be “talking past each other” — as indeed we see every day in the world around us, and often in our own contact and communication efforts as well.

   It is here that we can draw on the insights and implications of “post-structuralist” (or “post-modernist”) approaches to cultural issues, such as those we discussed in Part I, particularly with regard to the work of Clifford Geertz (1988) and others who share his views. If culture is a shared system of symbols and meanings (a definition that is completely in harmony with the Gestalt perspective being developed here — even as the Gestalt model adds an emphasis on emotion and belonging), then we understand intercultural conflict and misunderstanding as not so much a matter of conflicting goals or desires, but more as a clash of meaning systems. To be sure, individuals or groups (across cultures or within an identified culture) will often compete for dominance or access to some limited resource, and that competition may or may not be amenable to negotiation, compromise, or some kind of non-zero-sum partnership solution. Such conflicts are difficult enough at times. Indeed, they are the whole reason for government, under classical “social contract” theory, which essentially is simply the insight that we may all be better off (the strong as well as the less strong) if we agree to subscribe jointly to some superior authority, rather than each of us spending most of our separate resources guarding against unexpected aggression from all the others (see Wright, 1999).

   Intercultural conflict typically adds a whole other layer of complexity and challenge to these difficulties. “Intercultural,” by definition, means reflective of different grounds of belief and value, different systems of meaning and belonging. Indeed, it is the underestimation of the basic human need for belonging which lies at the heart of much of the Western difficulty with intercultural communication (other cultures bring other difficulties to the table). Much of Western individualist/ liberal ideology, after all, is based on the abstract notion of the homo economicus, the “free” individual who always acts in his own “rational best self-interest” (see discussion in Wheeler, 2000). But “rational” is a culturally relative term, in that actions which flow from an invisible cultural ground may look irrational, or without defensible meaning, to outsiders — when insiders could explain them perfectly rationally and well. And “self” is likewise a culturally variable concept: is the honor of my ancestors part of my “self” system? the economic attainment of my children? Again, it all depends.

   And again, this points to the dialogic intervention. It is no use to argue about whether a given action is or is not “justifiable.” Rather, the working assumption of a dialogic perspective and intervention is that everyone’s actions make sense — to him/her! Thus the emphasis on inquiry, as both a means of knowing the other better, and also the beginnings of a shared perspective and even joint action. How the one leads to the other is discussed in the section that follows, on experiment and the experimental stance.

6. The intentional focus on supports — The intention organizing the activity of dialogue, we have said above, is “not prevailing but deep understanding.” Well and good, but people and groups still desire to prevail. Even if the cultural aspect of an intergroup conflict has to do with different systems of meaning and belonging, the conflict almost always has “simple” competitive dimensions as well, for control of some resource that is felt to be scarce, fragile, or under threat. This is the complexity of intercultural conflict, and the thing which makes this type of clash so resistant to solution and difficult to work with: the way the competitive aspect of the conflict itself, which might well be successfully addressed by creative, “non-zero-sum” solutions of the type that have defined the expansion of civilization since at least the time of our primate ancestors, and characterize evolution in general, never get addressed, since the participants are “talking past each other” in cultural-meaning terms. And yet those cultural meanings also never get addressed, because of the stakes and pressure of the competition or threat itself! How can we ever break this kind of dynamic lock, and get to that ideal intercultural dialogue in the first place?

   The answer has to be: by the provision of additional supports. In a Gestalt field model understanding of human behavior and experience, all events are understood in relation to their supportive conditions in the field. This is axiomatic in the system: what happens is what the relevant field, the source of events and energy, favors (with “field” understood as comprising everything dynamically relevant, including the “inner” experiential worlds and intentions of all its subjective members) (cf. discussion in Wheeler, 2000). To change or add any behavior (including the behavior of focusing on ground beliefs and belongings) requires a change in the system of supports in the whole field.

   This additional support may come in any dynamically relevant area, ranging from physical boundaries to felt intentions and meanings. An example comes from the acute political/cultural conflict between Israel and Palestine, in which both these conflictual dimensions — competition for resources and clash of meaning/belonging systems — are vividly displayed. A famous intervention in this case began in 1993 (after long preparation, of course) with transporting the principal representatives of the conflict, Ytzak Rabin and Yassar Arafat, to a private estate in Norway, where they lived for the duration of the negotiations, taking their meals in the intimate personal atmosphere of their host’s family. This move to change the physical setting of the principals of a conflict, to someplace apart and well-bounded off from the location of the conflict itself, is a common one in negotiations large and small (even including the “neutral turf” of a therapist’s or mediator’s office), and serves to support the refocusing of attention, for the duration of the negotiations at least, on questions of meaning as opposed to urgent practical issues and the pressure of other members of each group. (To be sure, “selling” any resulting agreement to one’s own side afterwards can then be a new challenge, as the negotiating team may be perceived (rightly) by people “back home” as having begun to constitute a special cultural setting of its own, distinct from that of either home party to the conflict.

   Union/management negotiations are often plagued with this problem, and end up walking a delicate line between the necessary privacy to engage in “horsetrading,” and a degree of ongoing transparency of process which may block any movement at all. In this case, this issue was illustrated tragically by the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin of Israel a few months later, by a member of his “own culture” — thereby illustrating Proposition 3 above as well, that no culture is monolithic).

   Another dimension of support for resolution of this complex conflict at the level of meaning systems and belonging was provided by Rabin himself, both before and after the Oslo Accords. Long known as a “hawk” in Israel, upon becoming Prime Minister in his later years, Rabin began speaking of the future, reframing the issues of the conflict in terms of the world the participants were going to leave to their grandchildren. This too is a classic intervention sometimes known as “invocation of a supraordinate goal” — that is, a goal both parties can share, which transcends and trumps the immediate issues of the conflict, — an idea taken from the pioneering studies on intergroup conflict by Mustaf Sharif (Sharif, Asch & Milgram, 1969). In effect, what Sharif had done in that study, working with teams at a boys’ camp, was to create artificially two different “cultures,” each with its own defining criteria and membership (though the assignment to one team or the other was arbitrary), and then “turn them loose.” The results were so quickly and powerfully conflictual that in the end the experimenters had to manufacture a shared emergency (they purposely broke the camp’s water system) to overcome the intensity of the “cultures” that had taken hold.

   Thus a certain fund of applied knowledge has grown up about the supports required for dealing with this difficult area, deriving from negotiation theory and practice in general, and the especially thorny area of intergroup and multi-cultural negotiation in particular. Much of the contribution of the Gestalt model here, as in some other areas, is to insist on a primary focus on the dynamic issue of supports itself, and to systematize the informal body of wisdom and practice in the area.

7. Experimentalism as an organizing attitude — Experiment, in Gestalt, is understood in two senses. One is the more formal sense of the term: the explicit enactment of a trial case or scenario, to get feedback (from the environment or other people), evaluate, and decide on a course of action. We do this all the time, of course, in cases large and small, from tasting a bit of something to see if it is good all the way to scouting something out, spending time with someone to see if our interests coincide, trying a new strategy in any area of life, casting a vote in a particular way to try to influence an outcome. In this sense experiment is part of our evolutionary heritage, a direct implication of the learning style and strategy described above, which make up oour inherent Gestalt nature and process.

   The “experimental method,” in the scientific sense, is then really just another level of formalization of this necessary, natural process, which is key to our species survival. The particular hallmarks of scientific method are the attempt to be explicit about the hypothesis being tested, and the formal effort to control all the relevant factors (though of course we never can know that we have controlled all the possibly relevant variables — you cannot prove an open-ended negative with logical tools. In this sense even “hard” science remains always a culturally-influenced construct, not “objective reality” itself, since deep cultural assumptions will always permeate our decisions about the boundaries of inquiry about relevant factors). But these same principles — knowing what prediction we are testing out and attempting to see the relevant causal factors — are always involved, in a rough and ready way at least, in the ongoing learning experiments of life. It is in this everyday sense that experiment is implied by constructivism itself, the fundamental Gestalt insight and proposition that we are not the passive receivers of our experiential world, in the way 19th Century psychology imagined, but rather active agents and co-constructors of that experience. All intentional action has an experimental aspect, as long as we are at least open to considering the results of the action as a test case — which is to say, as a basis for useful learning and prediction. In the human case, predicated on flexible adaptation to novel circumstances, experiment and learning are inseparable.

   This then leads us to a second sense of experiment, one which is directly applicable to our consideration of cultural and multicultural issues here. This is the idea of experimentalism not just as a strategy but as an attitude, an organizing stance, in a particular situation or in life in general. Intention, as we keep emphasizing in this discussion, organizes our experiential field by selecting/ directing attention; this is a fundamental precept and corollary of the basic Gestalt proposition of our co-construction of experience itself. When we shift our intention in any given situation from outcome to learning, our attention necessarily shifts as well. But this is then the same as the shift we were discussing in the previous section, from espousing or defending a position, to inquiring about what is “behind” that position, for oneself as well as for the other person or group.

   In this way experiment as an attitude or stance is intimately linked with dialogue: dialogue, in the special sense we are giving the term here, is the experimental method, of cultural studies and multicultural intervention. Our dialogue is based on an authentic inquiry — that is, one in which I genuinely want to know the other person’s answer, and his/her world. Inquiry, in turn, is necessarily based on some hypothesis, however informal or implicit. The result is then to confirm or disconfirm that previous notion or wondering: in other words, to learn something.

   This in turn leads us to our final proposition, for a Gestalt-based approach to this field: the necessity of intercultural encounter for self-knowledge and growth, both as an individual and as a community or culture.

8. Multiculturalism as a value: intercultural contact as a condition of personal growth — As Gregory Bateson (1972) observed, it takes two to know one. Culture, as we have developed and defined the concept here, is something that in a very real sense only arises in multicultural contact. That is, we enact our culture — and know it as well, to a degree, in that we know how to enact it. But much of that “knowing” is implicit, performative or automatic, and largely out of awareness; this too follows from the understanding of the term as we have outlined it here, in Gestalt perspective: culture, ultimately, is that which we take for granted, and hold to be stable, so that our attention can be free for all those variable interests and urgencies of life, that have to be lived and dealt with. But taking it for granted means we do not know it very well ourselves, or at least not in an articulated way. As with the individual’s “interior” world, which is revealed (to her/himself as well as to the other person) in the intimate encounter with another (Wheeler, 1994), so with our cultural worlds: we get to know our own culture, in the encounter with another culture.

   But since culture informs and colors our perceptions of the world at every level (including especially all those things we take to be “objective reality” or culture-free!), this means that we can never really know ourselves unless and until we take part in that intercultural dialogic inquiry, that reveals ourselves and our culture to ourselves, as it reveals the other to her/himself, and to us as well. It is a mark of our times to know and take cultural differences into account (until we fail to, which is of course the deepest level of culture, the level where we thought our view was culture-free). It is a particular gift of the Gestalt perspective, and related constructivist/phenomenological, dialogic methods, to appreciate the value of the intercultural encounter, and the multicultural nature of our world.

   In the end, we would argue here, this encounter is more than a value: it is a necessity. It is at this level that we see a justification and a rationale for those much-beleagured cultural values, cultural pluralism, tolerance, and the liberal tradition. At least since the time of the Enlightenment period in 18th Century Europe, the idea of cultural pluralism as a positive value has emerged as an integral consequence of the rise of the movements known as Western liberal humanism (cultural values tradition honored, to be sure, at least as much in the breach as in the observance in “the West” over the past three centuries, a period marked by genocides of the Jews, the Gypsies, the Armenians, the Amerindians, and many other groups in the world at EuroAmerican hands, as well as by mass enslavement and deportation of Africans, religious and ethnic and gender persecutions, and countless other unspeakable violations and contradictions — but also by the first successful movements to ban slavery in the history of humankind, the founding of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights, and the growth of women’s and other civil rights movements for cultural groupings at every level of definition.

   But is this evolution and (conditional) spread of these values a case of cultural domination — or of the emergence of something new in the world, multiculturalism as a metacultural value? That is, is “Western humanism” itself just one more cultural value like others, imposed in the end (like some forms of “globalization,” which can amount at times to no more than Western economic imperialism under a new name) at the point of a gun? Or is it something more, a value with cultural roots (in many cultures) to be sure, like all values — but ultimately one of those evolutionary steps, a new level of feedback and complexity which contains the power to deconstruct and transcend itself? In other words, is “liberalism” itself, the metacultural proposition that people and groups have certain rights which “trump” the local values of any particular culture? If, for example, we actively oppose ourselves to the tradition of genital mutilation of certain groups, are we merely espousing the domination of our culture over another culture — or are we (also?) participating in a metacultural stance, which claims some metacultural ethical basis? And what, for another example, of the multitude of fundamentalisms burgeoning today (defined as claims for the revealed status of some particular text, and for the particular interpretation of those texts being espoused at the moment, as lying beyond the reach of further interpretation or doubt), and their claims of divine sanction (usually, ultimately and inherently, of the sword, as we would argue here)? How do we adjudicate the conflicting cultural claims of such groups and practices — other than by the sword?

   The Gestalt evolutionary perspective we have taken all through this essay on culture and multi-culturalism can help us here, toward resolving this old dilemma, which lies at the heart of “humanistic” toleration, and is nothing less than the most urgent issue of our times (equaling, perhaps surpassing, the desperate claims of global environmentalism). By appealing to our basic Gestalt-forming, field-resolving nature as a species — and by grounding that process description firmly in both “hard” research and evolutionary theory — we arrive at a new basis for justifying both multicultural toleration and the deconstruction of certain cultural claims alike (which in the end are the same thing). Our basis and our claim here, growing out of this model, are this: cultural pluralism and liberal tolerance (and certain intercultural interventions) are based on and justified by the proposition that multiculturalism and its corollary, cultural relativism, constitute an advantageous way of gathering and processing/interpreting information, a superior learning stance over mono-culturalism as a value — a stance more in harmony with our basic human nature as constructivist learning animals in a shifting field, and more supportive of the direction of human evolution, toward greater levels of complexity, greater articulation of human experience.

   That is, by appealing to the terms and conditions of our basic species nature, we seek and begin to find the outlines of the values of an emergent world culture, one that will necessarily in some way hold and contextualize local cultures, and place them in some (hopefully) viable, creative relationship among themselves. Will that holding context be one in which the whole tends to homogenize and obliterate the parts, in the way of the nation-state in relation to its subsidiary factions (see Wheeler, 2003a)? Or will it be more along the lines of the classic cultural/political metaphor of the human body, where the hand, say, becomes most vibrantly alive, its best and fullest “self,” by concentrating on its unique “hand-nature” and by harmonizing dynamically with the whole body. To separate and then oppose these two dialectic ideas to/from each other — self-definition and belonging — is to condemn both to loss or destruction, either by atrophy (losing the unique functions of that limb or organ –or sub-culture), or by invasion and domination of the whole by the part (unrestrained imperialistic dominance, or the body metaphor, cancer).

   This means that our next step in cultural evolution now, out of this perspective on experiment and dialogue as fundamentals of a Gestalt understanding of the field, must be in the direction of greater complexity of vision, a new level of articulation of our shared human experience, one that holds the other and the self. In the end this is experimentalism as a stance and a value, the logical fruits of the application of a Gestalt perspective to the field.

Conclusion

Our evolutionary nature, our basic species capacity to survive and thrive through flexible problem-solving and learning, means that as humans we are designed for culture. Culture is not a later “add-on” to the basic nature of an individual or group, but is the natural completion of our individual nature: in our species, nature and nurture are one. The Gestalt model, viewed in this way as evolutionary psychology, provides a description of the process of conversion of “figure” to “ground” or learning, the ongoing integration of novelty into automism, as the context and support for further learning. In this way Gestalt helps us to see how it is that culture is our ultimate “ground,” the context for all our other learnings. Thus there can be no such thing as learning, perception, or experience that is “culture-free.”

This perspective, as we have been developing it through this two-part essay, then has a number of further implications for thinking and practice in cross-cultural and multi-cultural work. First is our insistence on viewing the history of cultural and multi-cultural studies itself as a cultural product, arising in their current form in the particular cultural context and time of 19th/20th Century EuroAmerican imperialism, and permeated by the cultural assumptions and attitudes of those times. In reviewing that history here, we are led to consider the dangers and limitations of those assumptions and attitudes, and to look for a model which is not so much culture-free (an impossibility) as capable of examining and deconstructing its own assumptions in the course of the work. We find the outlines of such a model by applying the methods and concepts of a Gestalt dialogic approach to contact and other interventions across activated cultural boundaries. We have summarized and discussed a number points of such an outline here, under the following eight headings or propositions: 1) all contact is cultural contact; nothing we do or experience as humans is outside of cultural assumptions and biases; 2) the encounter between any consultant/facilitator and any client is itself an intercultural encounter, and must be approached with that awareness; 3) culture is never static; rather, all culture is multi-culture. That is, every person belongs to many different cultural or sub-cultural groupings; 4) the relevant, salient boundaries of these different groupings depend on context. When perceived interest and felt belonging shift, then the relevant cultural or sub-cultural context for experience and behavior will shift as well; 5) the fundamental intervention of a Gestalt approach to multi-cultural issues is dialogue, in the special sense of that term meaning a shared inquiry into the meaningful ground of each party’s behavior, position, and experience; 6) a particular demand and implication of this approach is then special attention to the issue of supports for such a dialogue; 7) experimentalism then becomes not just a technique or an intervention, but a basic organizing attitute; 8) and finally, when viewed in this way, multiculturalism and intercultural contact become not just presenting problems or issues, but positive values, parts of the necessary preconditions and ground for both full personal growth, and the articulation and development of culture itself.

Our world today is a multi-cultural world, to a degree and on a global scale unprecedented in the relatively short history of humans as a species, and the even shorter history of civilizations of beyond tribal size. In such a world, the articulation of a new and more complex way of holding cultural difference, of relating cultural parts to global whole in new context and experience, becomes the single most challenging demand of our shared global society. Plainly we are “wired” by evolution for belonging and the shared meanings that belonging brings and rests on; by the same token, we may well be predisposed as well for intergroup conflict, the prepotent readiness to identify an “in-group” of membership, and an “out-group” outside that boundary of belonging. Thus our challenge today is not only political and institutional: it is evolutionary and imaginative as well. Either we find the way to reimagine our world as a whole of belonging, consisting of multple and dynamically interrelated cultural parts, or the experiment our particular species adaptation represents may well be one more in evolution’s limitless series of dead ends. Either we transcend the “either-or” of tribalism and impermeable “insider/outsider” boundaries, stepping up to a new level of complexity of self-definition, multiple belonging, and experience, or humanity itself may come to an end. The destiny of the human experiment hangs in the balance. It is up to us, together, to find this new complexity of vision and understanding. The Gestalt model, with its emphasis on belonging and the dynamic play of identifications and differences, can help to show us the way.

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